Grace Cavalieri
The Long Game: Poems Selected & New The Word Works, 2024
$28.00
Playlist:
Grace Cavalieri reads from her new book The Long Game: Poems Selected & New. The book contains parts of 20 previously published books of poems. Today you will hear poems “Grandmother” and “The First,” characters from childhood who helped form poetic memories/visions in one section of The Long Game. “Grandmother” is about a strong individual who started the first Italian restaurant in Trenton N.J., the early part of the 20th century. “The First” depicts a recognition of feminism (age 5).
Poems read:
“Grandmother”
“The First”
Sarah Kain Gutowski
The Familiar
TTRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2024
$21.95
Playlist:
A book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar explores female existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family. Engaging with philosophy and pop culture, bouncing between high and low diction, The Familiar considers the effects of second and third-wave feminism through an absurdist and fabulist lens, wrestling with the notion women can truly “have it all.”
Poems read:
“Climate of Destruction”
“Torn and Useless”
“A True Believer”
“We Must Be Ruthless”
Sarah MaClay
Nightfall Marginalia
What Books Press, 2023
$17.00
Playlist:
“A Breathing Lake” is a response, in part, to a photo of a Sankai Juku dance-theatre performance. “The Hidden Springs” is initially situated in a dream I had right after seeing Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. “Before Us” explodes a constraint exercise initially based, at her encouragement, on the syntax of a poem by Kathy Fagan Grandinetti. Weaving through these poems: the navigation of and shocked gratitude for a renewed and impossible desire. Nightfall Marginalia, a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, is a collection of nocturnes and ekphrastics, constraint-based experiments, prose poems, and poems of the dream.
Poems read:
“A Breathing Lake”
“The Hidden Springs”
“Before Us”